Online Symposium, 31 August & 1 September 2023
The post-pandemic internet has seen a boom of micro-genres on platforms such as Tumblr and TikTok. Music, text, and images are combined to create audiovisual imaginaries with a look towards particular (pop)cultural niches at once nostalgic and utopian. Subcultures emerging during the 2010s have been joined by trends such as cottagecore and dark academia.
Following last year’s symposium on musical retrofuturism, this online symposium widens our focus to encompass contemporary ‘nostalgiacore’ in music and audiovisual media. We use this term to refer to an aesthetic emerging from the archival, escapist, and remediating capacities of the internet. We are interested not only in memory, but also the intersections of media and imagination—the ways in which nostalgia and desire can be cultivated for an era that was not experienced directly.
Draft programme
(All times in BST)
Day 1 – Thursday 31 August
12:45 – 13:00: Welcome
13:00 – 14:30: Session 1: Imaginaries of Place
Ekaterina Ganskaya
Retromania, retrotopia, ostalgia. Sovietwave: reassembling the non-existent past
Walter Stedman
Crossing the Language Barrier: Musical Elements of the City Pop Revival
Travis Stimeling
Country Music, TikTok, and NASCARcore
14:30 – 14:45: Break
14:45 – 15:45: Session 2: Cinematic Retrofuturism
Nick Anderson
Miyazaki in the Time of Cherries: Retrospective Resonances in Two Diegetic Songs from Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013)
Karin Fleck
The holographic jukebox in retrofuturist Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
15:45 – 16:00: Break
16:00 – 17:30: Session 3: Hauntology
Leah Amarosa
“The Kids Are All Dying”: Exploring Hauntology and the Uncanny in Pop Songs Depicting Gun Violence
Nathan Fleshner
Julien Baker, Go Home, and Religious Hauntology in Popular Music
Aria Greene
Hauntology, Queer Futurity, Online Fandom, and the Specters of Youth in Cacola’s Ruby Rose (2022)
Day 2 – Friday 1 September
13:15 – 13:30: Welcome
13:30 – 14:30: Session 4: Ludic Retrofuturism
Jordan Good
Looks Like Reality if You Cross Your Eyes: Animal Crossing’s New Horizons, Nostalgia, and Temporal Simulacra
Nicole Powlison
Cyberpunk Chronotopes: Creating Future Sounds using the Musical Past
14:30 – 14:45: Break
14:45 – 15:45: Session 5: News from Nowhere
Rodrigo Diogo & Paula Guerra
The emotion that (never) was: The subculture of ambience, nostalgia and the Internet’s aesthetic landscape
Andrew Ankersen
Apocalypse Then and Now: The Always-Becoming-Never-Being End of the World
15:45 – 16:00: Break
16:00 – 17:30: Session 6: Internet Aesthetics
Sarah Palfey Files
‘We all lived in the same house. You just forgot.’: Weirdcore’s Reflective Nostalgia
Clutch Anderson
Hexd music in Relation to Vaporwave: Reconstructed Nostalgia, Internet Music, and Accelerationism
Kate Galloway
“Haiku, Can You Sing?”: Retro Sounds for Posthuman Sonic Expression and the Synthesized Animals of Internet Media
Retrofuturism Symposium 2.0 